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Saturday, July 20, 2013

“Grand Slam”

Madison, WI – On 28 April, a
U.S. Lockheed U-2C spy plane, Article 358, was ferried from Incirlik Air Base
in Turkey to the US base at Peshawar airport by pilot Glen Dunaway. The fuel
had arrived the day before. The crew arrived, Francis Gary Power, and the
backup pilot, Bob Ericson. On the morning of 29 April, the crew in Badaber was
informed that the mission had been delayed one day. Then it was delayed again
because of the weather

It was fifteen days before the East-West Summit in Paris. The
mission’s code word was Grand Slam.Its purposewas to overfly the Soviet Union, photographing targets
including the ICBM sites at the Baikonur Cosmodrome and Plesetsk Cosmodrome,
then land at Bodø in Norway. It was May 1st.

However, Russia was on Red-Alert, they expected the fly over.
Lieutenant General of the Air Force
Yevgeniy Savitskiy ordered the air-unit commanders "to attack the violator
by all alert flights located in the area of foreign plane's course, and to ram
if necessary". A surface to air missile brought it down.

At first the Americans tried to
cover up, the Russians called them out. The president at the time, president
Eisenhower, had said at the beginning of his presidency that he would use the atomic
bomb if necessary, and tension was high. At the Four Powers Summit, which ended
the second day, Nikita
Khrushchev rescinded his invitation to Eisenhower to visit Russia, and the
summit ended. The American pilot was released less than two years later.

Such was the Cold
War, an era of brinkmanship, an era of everyone being constantly ready for air
raids. When the sirens went off, Time Square could be evacuated in two minutes.
From The Cuban Missile Crises to the explosion of the H-Bomb Shrimp, it was one
fear of annihilation of the planet after another.

However, the bombs were never
used. Although the war was called a cold one, many died in the far reaches of
the globe.It was a massive mistake. A
“century of man slaughter and mind slaughter.” It was a crime. Fear, greed, and
misunderstanding, built massive surveillance states, and caused useless wars
and weapons races. The Cold War was not quite over when Richard Nixon took the
presidency, in fact, even in Ronald Regan’s time it would still go on, but not
with the same vigor and fear. But there was still time, before the War began to
slow down, for one more episode to take place.